A Traveler’s Take on Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.23.07 | 3:12 PM ET

Forget the controversial fact-checking piece CNN’s Sanjay Gupta put together for Michael Moore’s documentary on health care, “Sicko.” Now, the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn—ever the provocateur columnist—takes Moore to task for his coverage of foreign hospitals, based entirely on Flinn’s own unplanned visits to hospitals in France, Cuba and elsewhere during his travels. “Michael Moore got it all wrong about the French health care system in his new movie, ‘Sicko,’” Flinn writes. “The best part isn’t that the government sends workers out to the homes of new mothers to do their laundry. It’s that French hospital meals come with wine. I don’t know how Moore, who seems rather starry-eyed over la belle France in the film, forgot to include that nugget.”

If that ommission wasn’t bad enough—wine, after all!—Flinn’s experience in a Cuban hospital was also nothing like the experience depicted in the film, he writes.

Still, Flinn agrees with Moore that the U.S. health care system is “badly broken” and that a single-payer system should be considered.

“It’s foolish, of course, to extrapolate too much from these little stories,” he writes. “Still, as the national conversation over health care picks up steam, we travelers can cut through some of the blather on both sides with first-hand accounts from other lands.”